The Stand by Stephen King (Complete and Uncut Edition)

 (Book Review)

This is my second foray into Stephen King. This time tackling what is probably his most famous work (and one of Sarah’s recommendations).

First note: this is one of the longest books I’ve read in a long time. My paperback copy is 1141 pages, but that’s with very tiny printing. I’m sure it would be many more pages in normal type setting.

And quite frankly, it doesn’t need to be that long. There are a lot of dead ends, reverses, sub-plots that really don’t go anywhere or have tangential importance to the main plot, and just wordiness. King obviously loves his job, and loves writing, but I kept thinking an editor should really have hacked away at it. I guess that’s what I get for buying the uncut edition. Ordinarily I’m a stickler for all the details, but in this case I think I would have been quite happy with the abridged version.

As King explains in the introduction, this edition was released in 1990, twelve years after the original edition in 1978. King says that most of the original cuts made from the 1978 version were made because of economic publishing concerns and not editorial reasons, so he justifies re-inserting the cut 400 pages. And I suppose that’s an author’s prerogative.

What I find more troubling is that King also updated his book for the 90s. I think this was a terrible idea. While I understand that it might be strange to publish a book in 1990 that predicts the apocalypse in 1980, I think the great thing about books is that they act as miniature time capsules from the time they were written. You’re bound to screw it up if you try and update it.

As wikipedia points out, the revised edition has a lot of anachronisms and fuzzy math probably due to sloppy editing. But updating a book is more than revising the dates and changing which war the characters fought in. The mood of the story is also trapped in the time period. The pre-apocalypse world of “The Stand” is filled with racial tensions, student activism, political extremism, and references to “long hairs”, all of which obviously belong to the 70s instead of the 90s. (More accurately to the late 60s, but I figure art is always five years behind reality).

There’s enough sex, swearing, blood and gore to insure that this book will never be a favorite of the religious right. And yet it’s a very religious book.

Almost all American horror movies and books are somewhat religious in the sense that they exploit Christian mythology to create horror stories of demons, devils, and hells. But “The Stand” emphasizes the power of God just as much as the power of Satan. Cut out all the “bad” stuff, and it could easily be re-written as part of “The Left Behind” series. The human characters are not so much free agents as they are pawns in a game between God and “the dark man”. They are guided by visions and prophecies and the occasional miracle.

In my more optimistic moments, I like to believe that God actively intervenes in this world. However I get uncomfortable when God intervenes too much in fiction. It seems like cheating. Whenever the characters get in a jam, the author creates another supernatural act to guide them. I believe the literary term for this kind of cheating is “Deus ex machina”, and there seem to be a lot of places where this term applies to “The Stand”.

All those criticisms aside, I enjoyed this book a lot more than “The Gunslinger”. The prose is very readable, and during the climax at the last 200 pages or so I was absolutely hooked and couldn’t put it down. Of course, that’s a lot of set up, about 1000 pages, to get to the final climax.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
The Green Hornet is the grand nephew of The Lone Ranger

Link of the Day
(From This Modern World)
Can there be any doubt that George Bush as one of the most corrupt and dishonest political figures in our nation’s history? He’s a man whose arrogance and incompetence have led to a string of scandals that combine the worst aspects of Teapot Dome, the Pentagon Papers, Tammany Hall, the Whiskey Ring, Watergate, and more. Misleading the public about the Iraq war, the use of torture as an interrogation tactic, spying on American citizens, looking the other way while war profiteers raid our treasury, diverting war funds without Congressional approval, blah, blah, blah. You’ve seen variations of this lists everywhere, yet corruption has become so normal at this point that the Bush’s latest misdeed, selectively and secretly “declassifying” a national intelligence estimate to provide to a single Administration-friendly reporter (aka. “leaking”), feels like more of the same.

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